Working across painting, installation, photography, and performance, COLA 2022 Design/Visual Art Fellow York Chang’s conceptual art blurs the boundaries between systems of knowledge to question our cognitive behaviors, biases, and impulses in how we make meaning.

Finding Fluencies is a virtual performance organized by Chang exploring how social connections can occur between people through seemingly nonsensical sounds and utterances akin to musical scatting or “speaking in tongues.” The performance, set to a musical score, investigates the conditions under which language begins to evolve naturally through use and repetition, without conscious planning or premeditation between people. Even as the participants perform a fluid, pseudo grammatical dialect of a language unknown to even themselves, they can find community and humanistic discovery through the strange musical dissonance and serendipitous intersections created by their individual subjective points of view.

The performance features participation by York Chang, Justin Cole, Todd Gray, David Kelley, Kyungmi Shin, and Tristen Shinen.

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Image Credit: York Chang, Grita (Glyph), Flashe paint and oil pastel on folded Japanese kozo paper, 20 x 46 inches, 2022. courtesy of the artist.